Carl Fritjofsson, who has run Stockholm, Sweden-based Creandum’s San Francisco office since 2016, says the timeline for European founders to cross the pond is compressing at a pace he’s never seen.
“There is more demand in the U.S. today than there is in Europe,” he told Fortune. “Especially if you’re selling towards enterprises with some kind of AI-native product. That is pulling people to do the U.S. expansion faster than ever before.”
But not every company gets to grow the way Lovable did. For enterprise-focused startups, “ready for the U.S.” still means putting a founder on a plane—and that’s where the playbook gets complicated. Fritjofsson acknowledged that the Trump administration’s visa friction is real, even if he’s not ready to call it a dealbreaker.
Yet Fritjofsson’s read is that the deregulatory tailwind for AI is outweighing the immigration headwind. “What Trump has done is also make the U.S. more AI-friendly when it comes to regulation,” he said. “The lessening friction on the commercial side has driven more demand than the additional friction on immigration has slowed it.”
And so it seems the question every European founder should be asking right now isn’t when to go to the U.S. It’s whether AI has already made the question obsolete.
See you tomorrow,
